Halloween and the Day After

October ends with All Hallows Eve and November begins with All Saints Day which in some countries, like Mexico, is known as the Day of the Dead. These two days reflect the tension present in human existence between duty and responsibility on the one hand, and license and self-gratification on the other. On Hallows Eve, restraint is thrown by the wayside, social norms are ignored, extortion of the neighbor is the operative moral maxim: “Trick or Treat” or translated: “Give me candy or I’m gonna do something bad to you or your property.” The idea of Halloween is to push the envelope by highlighting the macabre, the horrific, the disgusting, the monstrous. Why? Because the following day is All Saints Day: our obligation to remember the dead and make provision for them.

In Mexico the day after Halloween is observed by relatives bringing food to the cemetery to “feed” their dearly departed. In some other countries, flower petals are strewn from the grave of the loved one to the house of their living relative so they can find their way home where a fresh cooked meal awaits. It’s a time of honoring and remembering the deceased. The implied moral maxim is: We have duties and responsibilities to our loved ones that extend beyond this life, we must honor and respect those who came before us (and have preceded us in death). Of course in our debased, secularized culture, only half of the tradition remains: Halloween, the emphasis on license and self-gratification. The second part, All Saints Day, emphasizing duty and responsibility to loved ones has been erased from cultural memory. Now don’t get me wrong. Halloween is a fun time for kids, and I always enjoyed taking my children out dressed in cute wholesome costumes to get candy. As a Christian I see nothing wrong with participating in the fun and wholesome aspects of a cultural tradition. But as often happens in our culture, the spiritual aspects of holidays (holy days) are ignored or lost from view: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter come to mind. These too have become mere occasions for eating and shopping, with the spiritual aspect virtually ignored.

Another example of the tension between the bodily and the spiritual, and so relatedly between self-gratification and self-denial, is Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday” is a time of excess, carnival (“carne” “vale” – the worth of the flesh), casting off restraint, and so we all know of the riotous, orgiastic, drunken celebrations in places like New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. Why do people behave this way? Because the next day is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when the devout must sacrifice something to remember that Jesus sacrificed himself for us. Do those crowds we see celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans then enter into an attitude of sober reflection and self-restraint as Lent begins? Probably not. Again a reminder that our culture is much more attracted to the bodily, the sensual, to license and libertinism rather than to the spiritual, the contemplative, duty, responsibility, and self-denial. As Christians we need to remind our fellows of this second aspect of life.